A personal view on statistics in earth sciences

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Monthly Archives: July 2016

In my final post on the background on the recently published paper, I would like to take a look into the future of this kind of research. Basically it highlights again what I have already written at different occasions, but putting it together in one post might make it more clear.

The datasets and their basic interpretation are the most dramatic point, where I expect the greatest steps forward in the next years. Some paper came out recently that highlight some problems, like the interpretation of coral datasets. We have to make steps forward to understand the combination of mixed datasets and this can only happen when future databases advance. This will be an interdisciplinary effort and so challenging for all involved.

The next field involved are the models. The analysis is currently done with simple models, which has its advantages and disadvantages. New developments are not expected immediately and so more the organisation of the development and sharing the results of the models will be a major issue in the imminent future. Also new ideas about the ice sheets and their simple modelling will be needed for similar approaches as we had used in this paper. Statistical modelling is fine up to a point, but there are shortcomings when it goes to the details.

The final field is the statistics. Handling sparse data with multidimensional, probably non-gaussian uncertainties has been shown as complicate. There needs to be new developments of statistical methodology, which are simple on the one side, so that every involved discipline can understand them, but also powerful enough to solve the problem. We tried in our paper the best to develop and use a new methodology to achieve that, but there are certainly different approaches possible. So creativity is needed to generate methodologies, which do not only deliver a value for the different interesting parameters, but also good and honest uncertainty estimates.

Only when these three fields develop further we can really expect to get forward with our insights into the sea-level of the last interglacial. It is not a development, which will happen quickly, but I am sure that the possible results are worth the efforts.